4
Panel on Early-Career Engineers

After lunch, Rebekah Green, Institute for Global and Community Resilience, Western Washington University, and Daniele Lantagne, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), addressed the group as members of a panel moderated by Joseph Le Doux, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Both women are junior, or early-career, engineers who have worked on social justice and sustainable community development. In their talks, they addressed the following questions:

What led you to your career choices? How do you see them in relationship to the goals of this meeting, to enhance engineering research and practice and improve engineering education through attention to issues of engineering, social justice, and sustainable community development?

4.1“COMMUNITY ENGINEERING”

Dr. Green described the choices that led her to enter the field of “disaster research,” which requires combining scientific, engineering, and community knowledge. After earning an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and several years working in a structural design firm, Dr. Green decided to do graduate work in Cornell University’s Civil Engineering Department. Her advisor allowed her to take courses in anthropology and science and technology studies, stipulating that she had to integrate the work into her dissertation research. She was able to do this by specializing in disaster studies.

In the research for her dissertation, she examined perceptions of seismic risk and building decisions in squatter settlements that comprise about 50 percent of the built environment in and around Istanbul, Turkey. She found that perceptions of physical and social risk influenced

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4
Panel on Early-Career Engineers
After lunch, Rebekah Green, Institute for Global and Commu-
nity Resilience, Western Washington University, and Daniele Lantagne,
Centers for Disease Control (CDC), addressed the group as members
of a panel moderated by Joseph Le Doux, Department of Biomedical
Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Both women are junior,
or early-career, engineers who have worked on social justice and sus -
tainable community development. In their talks, they addressed the
following questions:
What led you to your career choices? How do you see them in relationship to
the goals of this meeting, to enhance engineering research and practice and
improve engineering education through attention to issues of engineering,
social justice, and sustainable community development?
4.1 “COMMUNITY ENGINEERING”
Dr. Green described the choices that led her to enter the field of
“disaster research,” which requires combining scientific, engineering,
and community knowledge. After earning an undergraduate degree in
civil engineering and several years working in a structural design firm,
Dr. Green decided to do graduate work in Cornell University’s Civil
Engineering Department. Her advisor allowed her to take courses in
anthropology and science and technology studies, stipulating that she
had to integrate the work into her dissertation research. She was able to
do this by specializing in disaster studies.
In the research for her dissertation, she examined perceptions of
seismic risk and building decisions in squatter settlements that com-
prise about 50 percent of the built environment in and around Istanbul,
Turkey. She found that perceptions of physical and social risk influenced

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0 ENGINEERING, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
building decisions. People in the settlements did not trust engineers
and insisted on constructing buildings without engineering assistance.
By working with a public education unit in Istanbul that included engi-
neers, construction workers, sociologists, and social workers, Dr. Green
developed a program to teach the public about good building to dimin-
ish seismic risk. Despite some negative reactions, the program has been
integrated into trade schools and the education ministry.
Dr. Green said other projects
she undertook in Central Asia
“I am perceived as something were not as successful, because the
that is not an engineer. I’m
stakeholders could not agree on
working there as a disaster
minimally acceptable risk. In all of
researcher. . . . [My] engineer-
the projects, she said, “we weren’t
ing background is just sort of
just debating technical details but
this interesting personal history
. . . but I feel like more of an professional responsibility. It was
engineer than ever because
an attempt to ensure safety in an
I’m actually working towards
area of extremely high uncertainty.
innovating for the future which
[T]he result was [not only a] com-
is what engineers do.”
promise on technical details but
also a compromise on ethical prin-
Rebekah Green,
Western Washington University ciples. . . . [However,] we all had
to agree that these guidelines were
better than nothing.” Understand-
ing the social context in which the construction would be done was
essential to ensuring that local construction companies and workers
would proceed in a safer fashion than they had previously, although
the new construction might not satisfy the standards taught to U.S.
engineers.
Dr. Green also described her work in post-Katrina New Orleans on
damage assessment and recovery plans for a low-income neighborhood.
Working with 80 students from Cornell, Columbia, and the University
of Illinois, Urbana, she helped develop a plan for the lower Ninth Ward
that was supported by the New Orleans City Council.
Afterward, when she began looking for an academic post, she found
that her priorities did not match those of traditional engineering depart-
ments, which considered sustainability and humanitarian work as com -
plementary, rather than essential, to their programs. She now teaches in
a program that trains urban planners, disaster mitigation specialists, and
emergency planners, but not engineers. Nevertheless, she believes that
as a “community engineer” her research and advice, although less valued

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PANEL ON EARLY-CAREER ENGINEERS
by engineers and anthropologists, may make a significant contribution
to the creation of a just society.
4.2 ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
Ms. Lantagne, CDC, described environmental engineering as a criti-
cal component of public health. Her career began with her interest in
protecting rivers. With a bachelor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) in environmental engineering, she was able to
use her technical engineering skills to promote sustainable watershed
communities in Massachusetts. Her master’s degree, also from MIT,
focused on household water treatment and involved courses at the John
F. Kennedy School of Government (Kennedy School) at Harvard Uni-
versity. In her master’s thesis, an examination of trihalomethane levels
in a double-bucket filter system used in Haiti indicated that the system
was safe. She subsequently has received her qualification for professional
engineering in environmental engineering.
At CDC, she provides technical assistance to nongovernmental orga-
nizations (NGOs) working in developing countries to improve water
in many ways. In the past eight years, she has worked in more than 40
countries, sometimes involving a brief trip to a site, a chemical test, a
quick intervention, or consultation with follow-up from local stakehold-
ers. For instance, a small CDC team may help with water-quality testing,
or product development or selection, or government approvals. Ms.
Lantagne used the example of the importance of treatment of household
water. The lack of properly treated water, she said, contributes greatly to
the deaths of children under the age of five in many areas of the world.
We have the technologies to solve this problem, she said, but the dif-
ficulty is getting them to the people who need them.
It’s important, she noted, to recognize that people with different
roles describe the problem in different ways. Water must be safe to
drink in a user’s cup or hands. Just because it leaves a water-treatment
plant free of fecal coliform, which may be satisfactory to plant engi-
neers, is not sufficient to ensure its safety as drinking water. The same is
true of delivering water through a pipe. Ensuring the safety of drinking
water will require the political will and economic planning to improve
the water supply, water treatment, latrine building, and hand-washing
behaviors. Technological verification of water quality is necessary, but
much, much more is required for a program to be successful.
Ms. Lantagne argued that effective communication is essential to

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ENGINEERING, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
changing habitual behaviors. A suc-
cessful project requires integrating
“We asked a woman in a rural
home to give us a glass of skills and knowledge from several
water the way she would pre-
academic fields to implement and
pare it for a child and we test
monitor a sustainable system that
that.”
can be scaled to meet community
needs. In Kenya, for example, local
Daniele Lantagne, CDC
companies prepare and bottle a
very low-cost chlorine solution dis-
tributed by an international NGO
marketed by radio, TV, and street theater. Midwives who use the solu-
tion recommend it to new mothers.
4.3 DISCUSSION
The discussion that followed was focused on identifying the compo-
nents of an engineering curriculum or activities that would encourage
students to develop a better understanding of ethical dimensions and
subtleties. As the two women had said, Ms. Lantagne’s undergradu -
ate schooling had included and encouraged both engineering content
and courses outside engineering that had contributed to her approach
to solving complex, poorly defined problems. Dr. Green’s schooling
had not included those “outside” influences. Nevertheless, Dr. Green
believes that considerations of sustainability are more encouraged today
than they were when she was a student.
Environmental engineer Jonathan Essoka, Environmental Protec -
tion Agency, Philadelphia, commented that attracting students from
diverse backgrounds to engineering could create a climate for more
diversity in engineering education. Ms. Lantagne agreed and pointed
out that the National Academy of Engineering website, EngineerGirl!,
which emphasizes that the purpose of engineering is to enable young
girls to become what they want to be—“whether that’s environmental
justice in the States or in developing countries or building a cool space -
ship, we need to do all of it,” sends a strong message about the potential
social and humanitarian benefits of engineering. Dr. Agogino added that
funding agencies should take the societal effects of proposed engineer-
ing research projects into consideration in their funding decisions.

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